Eight tracks of no filler and no apologies. SE9 Part 2 picks up exactly where Skye Newman left off – standing in the wreckage of a postcode, a relationship, a family. It’s what happens when you finally look a storm dead in the eye. Eight tracks that feel less like songs and more like a reckoning with the patterns she inherited and the woman she’s becoming in spite of all of it.
It opens with ‘Man of the House’, and the first few beats do what the best album openers do: they settle you. Not in the sense of calming you down, but in the sense of letting you know you’re in safe hands. No waiting for the album to make its case, no hoping it gets better two tracks in. Just that immediate, quietly thrilling feeling that something good is about to happen. There’s an Amy Winehouse shadow hanging over it – that same soulful fury, with a voice that hooks you. Newman sings about a love that makes no sense to stay in and yet she can’t leave, hitting lines like “you’d argue grass is purple so you can tell me I’m wrong” with the exhausted precision of someone who has had that exact argument one too many times. The riffs are everywhere, the beat is warm and rolling, and your shoulders are moving before you’ve even clocked what’s happening.
‘Crawling’ arrives slower, heavier – but in that paradoxical way where the weight of the lyrics somehow makes you want to move. There’s a gorgeous crack in her voice, vulnerability sitting right on the surface, and then the chorus lands: “crawling, crawling, tears you had me dropping, no water’s gonna stop me” and it hits like a door opening. It’s a song about the messy, unglamorous middle of healing. Not the breakthrough moment. The crawl before it.
‘Walk’ is the most immediately commercial thing here and it deserves to be. Produced by Boo & Luis Navidad, it has that hook “let’s go tit for tat, you say shit I’ll say it back,” that lodges somewhere in your chest and refuses to leave. The chorus does something clever: blisters from walking in someone else’s shoes becomes the central image, and then she flips it. It’s not blood on the pavement, it’s Christian Louboutin. It’s funny and sharp and completely earned. Skye herself has said it’s about “putting your heels on and walking away” and you believe her completely.
‘Too Far South’ is where the geography of the project becomes most literal. There’s a contrast in her voice here, alternating between a raw, grounded soul tone and something softer and more vibrato on the ends of lines, like she’s holding herself together mid-sentence. The drums arrive in the second verse and when they do, it feels like something shifting. Like she’s convincing herself in real time. I’m gonna be selfish with my life, cause it’s mine. The drums make that sound like a march, not a retreat.
‘Traumatised’ is Newman angrier, and it suits her. The bass guitar pulses underneath, there’s a shaker keeping quiet time, and then after that first chorus the beat drops in properly and you feel the tempo lift. She’s singing words sharp and clipped before dragging out the last ones. It’s technically interesting and emotionally honest at the same time. The outro, repeating “I’m not crazy” over and over with increasing intensity, walks a fine line between conviction and unravelling – and the fact that you can’t quite tell which it is feels like the whole point.
Then everything quiets down for ‘Lost Myself to a Man.’ Stripped back guitar, vocal front and center, almost no ornamentation. She’s singing so clearly, so deliberately – no riffs, no armour – that it genuinely feels like she’s telling you something she just figured out. Like you happened to be in the room at the exact moment of realisation. After the power she commands everywhere else on this project, the choice to underplay here is a statement in itself.
‘Woman I Am’ is the love letter, the thank-you, the exhale. Cycles syncing, staying at each other’s houses, dragging each other out of dark places. It’s the female friendship song done without sentimentality or saccharine. The sentiment lands, even if the production doesn’t quite have the same pull as what surrounds it. A celebration of femininity that is such a key part of healing.
And then ‘Vicious Cycle’ closes everything out. Guitar in the background, that signature airy crack in her voice appearing on the high notes, and the chorus made up of a single line, repeated, with different riffs and octaves each time around. “It’s a vicious cycle.” The song is literally in one. It ends the project the way SE9 started: raw, honest, and with more soul than most artists find in a whole career.
Skye Newman is 22 and she already sounds like someone who has lived a decade more than that. Not in a heavy, joyless way, but in the way that means every emotion she puts in a song has already been felt fully, turned over, examined, and handed back to you transformed. SE9 Part 2 doesn’t wrap things up neatly. It doesn’t pretend the storm is over. But it ends knowing she’ll be standing when it passes.
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Words: Lola Carron